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The Lesser Known Ranges of the · Otago

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The Lesser Known Ranges of the · Otago 44 THE LESSER KNOWN RANGES OF THE OTAGO ALPS THE LESSER KNOWN RANGES OF THE · OTAGO ALPS • BY J. T. HOLLOWAY • Read before the Alpine Club, August I I, I 942 • • When the Honorary Secretary invited me, as a young overseas member of the Club, to read a paper before you on the subject of the Otago Alps, I must confess I welcomed the opportunity. I am not by nature garrulous, but on this one subject alone I lack all inhibition even when I stand in surroundings such as these, hallowed by Alpine tradition and in the midst of my seniors. To me the Otago Alps have been the beginning and the ending of Alpine ambitions, and while I would .dearly like to visit other ranges and to climb in other lands, I feel that, deep in my subconscious mind, such a desire arises solely from a wish to acquire a yardstick wherewith I might more truly measure the magnificence of my own mountains. The Otago Alps might be defined as comprising that highland area lying to the south of Haast Pass and bounded to the west by the Tasman Sea, to the east by the cold lakes and the arid inland ranges, and to the south bv the circum-antarctic waters of the Pacific Ocean. J Here the traveller will find set out before him, not only the fjords of Norway, but also the glaciers and lakes of Switzerland, the forested ranges of British Columbia and the mellower glory of the English Lakes : the whole welded into harmony and stamped with the romance of the unsettled frontier. To describe these mountains, to portray their beauty, I find difficult within so brief a compass. I wish not only to give you some conception of the joys they offer to the mountaineer, but, at the sarne time, to say something of the hills themselves, their origin, their form and their modern vestment of forest and glacier. The Otago Alps took their origin during the same period of mountain building, the l{aikoura orogeny, as the Southern Alps proper. For some reason, however, they escaped the foldings and crusta! disloca­ tions which were experienced in the north and this has given them those characteristics -vvhich mark them off as a distinct alpine region. The Jurassic land surface had been reduced to a peneplane, cut in the south-west in granites and in grano-diorites and in the north-east in a great complex of metamorphic schists. This peneplane was up­ lifted and tilted from north-east to south-west, the surface being un­ disturbed save for the development of a series of faults and zones of weakness. During and after uplift normal river erosion proceeded and valleys were etched out along these fault lines until this cycle was brought to a close by the onset of the recent ice age, the ice of which is still represented in the uplands. The glaciers of the ice age deepened THE LESSER KNO\VN RANGES OF THE OTAGO ALPS 45 and over-deepened the pre-existing river valleys and, retreating, have left a typically glaciated topography, most marked in the granite country but everywhere evident, and especially have they left a fjord­ land coastline in the granites fronting the Tasman Sea and great moraine-dammed lakes in the trough valleys to the east. Thus, at the present day we have a highland area of rugged topo­ graphy, bounded by fjords and glacial lakes and characterised by marked co-ordination of summit level, summit altitudes varying from B,soo feet in "the north-east to 4,ooo feet in the far south-west. The only exceptions are the three peaks, Aspiring, Tutoko and Earnslaw, which rise a thousand feet above their neighbours and probably represent monadnocks left during the original peneplanation. All ranges carry permanent snowfields, some of large extent, and, par­ ticularly in the Forbes, Dart Barrier, Darran and Olivine ranges and in the Aspiring group, large valley glaciers exist. Travelling unimpeded across thousands of miles of open ocean, the west winds break in spectacular storms along the granite cliffs of fjordland. Here in the coastal valleys where even winter tempe~atures are mild, we find. an expression of subtropical rainforest. This is a mixed forest of broadleaved evergreen trees and southern conifers with an underwood of mesophytic shrubs of Malayan aspect. Ferns, ground ferns, epiphytic ferns, tree ferns, filmy ferns, lianes and creepers, epiphytic astolias and orchids, choke the depths of.the forest. Between three and four thousand feet the trees give place to the mountain scrub. Mountain <;onifers, coprosmas, shrubby composites and dracophyllums interlock and intertwine, so that the passer by must needs walk on matted branches some feet above the ground. Again higher, and the scrub disappears and we reach the flower fields ; but these also are of their own peculiar type. Yellow and white, the primitive colours, alone bed~ck these mountain sides, although in the spray-filled gorges far below, the scarlet rata flames across the valley. The alpine vegetation, that on the rocks and screes at and above snowline, is akin to that of Andine South America. Curious cushion and mat plants of several genera and families extend to the summit · rocks themselves. · Across the coastal ranges, in the inter-montane valleys, the forest is modified by the entrance of the Southern beech, an evergreen tree of sub-antarctic rain forest. Indeed, the beech extends to the coast itself, where it finds lodgment on granite fjord walls too inhospitable to support normal rain forest. Eastwards again, perhaps across a second range or in the head of a fault valley cutting across the ranges, we enter true sub-antarctic rain forest, compounded of three beech species zoned altitudinally. This forest is closely related to that of Southern Chile. It is more open in character than the coastal forests and, as we travel east and the annual rainfall lessens, two hundred inches to one hundred, one hundred to fifty, fifty to twenty, so the undergrowth decreases until in its eastern limits the forest is as open and as easy to travel in as English beech woods. On the eastern ranges • .. 46 THE LESSER KNOWN RANGES OF THE OTAGO ALPS the forest disappears save in damp gullies and narrow ravines and we have bare rocky mountainsides of a. semi-desert type clothed in dull ochreous tussock grasses and harsh xerophytic shrubs. Until the coming of man the forests were devoid of animal life, that is to say, of mammals. Birds there were, parrots, wrens, tits, robins, .curious wingless birds, and the two glorious songsters, the tui and the mako-mako. Ducks flourished un~isturbed in· the rivers and .lakes and, until recent centuries, the eastern ranges were the home of the giant moas. N O\V, unfortunately, the European, in· his mania for the ' sport ' of shooting, has introduced deer and wapiti, goats and pigs, while above forest level thar and chamois are increasing. Grati­ fying as it may be for the modern mountaineer to find at the end of 0>, OUYn.JE. ALPS NO!n'H w e81' crr.ux> • I ' • ' -· .,...,I ...... ... --· __. --- . o.- N ... o C..f'1'J 0 . • 0 ' ~-~· Q - • "Bo.-o~ ­ \ , H ..... ..,- <>""_0, __ ""f'l.ol • 0 ' 0 D....C• t•t ' 0~. t ,......, V D•• .. • .... • ,.. .,.,.. 2 # ~ ... ~ "' • #rA.l.A ..., "' ..., .,.- •••. •' '•-toot- ,~ ,,....... o•..,• .... #I •"'~ b N ~o--,- ··- ... , .di•• a ., .~ ~,_.._., . ('J 4., h....._ 1U ·c. ;pc w#. 11 .......... ·~ " I~ • • ' 1.:-<1 -~ ,, ~- 11 .,.(.,. All·-- .., ~ If' 4m..,o - · h .q,.. I'M • o•--• '" ,_,.­I"" •• • ' t....,.,. ~ _.._ .... y -~ o·--- / ~ "-'-• • . ....... ~-1:- '"'-MA- • . an arduous day on the tops a deer track through the scrub to his base camp in the valley below, it yet must be realised that these forests, evolved during countless millions of years in the complete absence of grazing and browsing animals, are now completely unfitted to with­ stand their ecological impact. In the absence of control,· a thing most difficult of achievement, the forests as we know them are doomed. It is a problem of the greatest iinportance, not only for the forest officer and the naturalist, but also for the river control engineer and the soil conservationist. To the scientist the Otago Alps offer a plethora of problems. There is the problem of flower colour, the problem of circum-antarctic vegetational relationships with the bearing of this on Wegener's ' ' THE LESSER KNOWN RANGES OF THE OTAGO ALPS 47 hypothesis of Continental Drift. There is the problem which con­ froilts us when we consider the apparent instability of plant species, the frequent hybridisation, the frequent mutations. There is the problem of the influence of deer on the forests, the problem of ecological interplay between sub-tropical and sub-antarctic rain forests. No glaciological investigations have been made although glaciation, moderately heavy, at low altitudes and in a temperate climate, would seem to present a most attractive field. Little is known of the insects- ·of many things nothing is known. But all this remains for the future. Meanwhile for the climbing. The Otago Alps do not offer many problems of any great technical difljculty. I mean by this that the normal routes on peaks and passes are not in essentials Alpine problems ; and "re have not reached, except in isolated cases, the stage _at which more and tnore difficult routes and variations on routes are sought. Up to the present we have been concerned with making first ascents and traverses, with pioneer work on the passes and cols and with glacier exploration, and our guiding principle has invariably been ' maximum safety with maximum precaution,' a guiding rule which in unknown country insists upon the easiest possible routes of ascent.
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